


The Little Things

by onward_came_the_meteors



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 7, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 7 Spoilers, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brian Banner's A+ Parenting, Bruce Banner Needs a Hug, Captain America Fan Phil Coulson, Deke Shaw Being Deke Shaw, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kid Bruce Banner, One Shot, POV Third Person, Protective Skye | Daisy Johnson, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:48:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24920098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onward_came_the_meteors/pseuds/onward_came_the_meteors
Summary: "Can I help you?""You must be Rebecca Banner. I'm Agent Coulson with S.H.I.E.L.D."___Canon divergence in which, in order to stop 1973's Project Insight, the team visits a young Bruce Banner and discovers that not all of the Avengers' struggles began when they became heroes.Spoilers for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 7 Episode 5
Comments: 2
Kudos: 52





	The Little Things

**Author's Note:**

> Last night's episode was absolutely amazing and filled me with inspiration, so here you go! Like I mentioned in the summary, this fic does contain spoilers for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 7 Episode 5, and it also contains a few references to child abuse, as happens when we have a tiny Bruce Banner. There is nothing explicit, but I am putting the warnings here so everyone can proceed at their own comfort level.

  
  


The car slowed to a stop on a nondescript street lined with suburban houses, the pale glint of the sun just beginning to peek out over the rooftops and shining through the windows. It looked perfectly normal—nothing on the outside would ever lead someone to predict who would come from here in the future.

Daisy Johnson looked out at the house they’d parked in front of. “You sure this is the right place?”

Coulson nodded and pushed the driver’s side door open. It hadn’t been hard to decide which of them should drive; Daisy herself had had no idea where they were going, Sousa hadn’t driven since the 1950s, and Deke… well, he was Deke. Everyone else had agreed to head to S.H.I.E.L.D., or at least the 1973 version of it, since there was no way the team would succeed without splitting up.

After Daisy had hacked into the computer in Malick’s office (if you could even call it hacking, really, the technology here—er, now—was ridiculously unprotected) and discovered the list of Project Insight targets, they’d had to move fast. Most of the names on the list were people who could be easily contacted through S.H.I.E.L.D. communications or otherwise, but in… special cases, as Coulson had put it (“people who saved everyone’s asses from aliens” was how Daisy had put it, but then Sousa got that brain-imploding look on his face again and she decided to back off from stuff like that) it was much more reassuring to deliver the message in person.

What the message was going to be, exactly, Daisy had no idea, but they’d improvised before. At least this would hopefully be easier than Yo-Yo, Mack, May, and Jemma’s job… convincing Nick Fury and Peggy Carter that they were in danger from Hydra and had to hide themselves did not sound like fun. She’d never met either of them in person, but she’d heard enough stories from other agents back when S.H.I.E.L.D. still had the facade of a functioning governmental system to know that she would not want to get on either one’s bad side by mistake. Even if these versions would be forty years younger than the ones she’d’ve been more familiar with.

So lucky her… she got this instead. She climbed out of the car after Coulson, quickly followed by Deke and Sousa once he’d pulled his cane out. It was still pretty early, so no neighbors were outside, but she still cast a scanning look up and down the street just in case. The four of them weren’t exactly inconspicuous, unless Deke’s outfit was really more socially acceptable than she’d thought.  _ I was a ‘90s kid, we dressed terribly in an entirely different way. _

“This one,” Coulson said, pointing to a house a few down from where they’d parked. 

“I didn’t see addresses on Hydra’s target list,” Sousa said, frowning.

Daisy grinned. “This is Coulson you’re talking to. He knows more trivia about the Avengers than Wikipedia.”

Coulson shut the car door and started up the sidewalk. “That’s exaggerating, just because my job involved—”

“Where was Captain America born again?”

“569 Leaman Place—all right, enough of that.” The rest of the team began following Coulson up to the house in question. There was no car in the driveway, but lights were on downstairs, so either they were home or they just really didn’t care about wasting electricity. 

They filed up the sidewalk—Coulson in front, then Daisy, then Deke, and Sousa bringing up the rear—and stopped in front of the door. 

“What’s the plan? Do we have one?” Deke asked in a hushed voice. “And can we make one real quick?” 

“Unfortunately, we’re working on Hydra’s timetable, not ours,” Coulson said, and rang the doorbell.

“We could at least make part of one—!” 

The curtain on the door window parted a shade before the door itself was pushed open, revealing a dark-haired woman in a gray sweater that was slightly too warm for the weather. “Can I help you?” Her look of confusion grew as she took in all the people behind Coulson, now tinged with a hint of wariness.

Coulson reached for the I.D. in his pocket before remembering that he wasn’t in his regular clothes. He settled for an official tone of voice as he said, “You must be Rebecca Banner. I’m Agent Coulson with S.H.I.E.L.D.”

“Hi,” Deke added from the back. 

_ I might  _ not _ have gone with our real names, but if Coulson really thinks he knows what he’s doing…  _

“With what?” Rebecca Banner looked like she was regretting opening the door. “Excuse me, but I’m not entirely sure what this is about…”

“It’s rather important.” Coulson looked behind him to the street, even though the only things there were leaves caught in sewer drains and chalk drawings on the neighbors’ sidewalks. No Hydra, no Insight… at least not right at this moment. “Can we come in?”

Rebecca Banner looked over them all again before nodding and stepping back to open the door wider. Daisy felt bad showing up at this woman’s house like this, but the alternative was letting satellite targeting systems controlled by Nazis controlled by robots blow up her son before he graduated elementary school. 

The front door opened into a fluffy-carpeted living room with a couch and an armchair arranged around the coffee table. Deke snorted into his hand when he spotted the TV, but Rebecca Banner didn’t appear to notice, walking forward around the chair.

“Honey, we have visitors,” she said to someone out of Daisy’s view. “Do you want to pick that up and maybe move upstairs while I talk to them?”

Daisy couldn’t resist. She stepped forward and peered over the top of the couch, where a little boy was curled on the floor, a piece of construction paper and some crayons spread out on the coffee table. She could only see the top of his head, which was dark and curly like his mother’s, but she was pretty sure she was looking at one of the future original Avengers. 

_ Did not expect that for how my day was gonna go. _

Coulson cleared his throat. “Actually… he’s what we came to talk about.” 

Rebecca Banner looked at Coulson, her brow furrowed. “Robert? He’s four.”

“Yes. It’s a bit of a long story, but the short version is that your son is in danger and you need to hide. Preferably sometime within the next three years.”

Daisy propped her elbows up on the back of the couch. “Basically there’s a group of robot aliens who are sort of taking over the planet and trying to alter our timeline, and we don’t want that to happen.” Hey, they might as well be completely honest; Rebecca Banner didn’t seem to be the type to be easily fooled, and they really needed her trust for this. 

Rebecca Banner blinked slowly. “Who are you exactly?”

“Agent Johnson,” Daisy said, with what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “And this is Agent Sousa and… “ she couldn’t quite bring herself to say “Agent Shaw” “... Deke.”

Sousa nodded from where he’d been looking around only a little less obviously than Deke. “Nice to meet you, ma’am.”

“Lovely home,” Deke added. He looked up at the ceiling. “So is WiFi invented yet or…” Daisy elbowed him. “What? I’m trying to make small talk!”

“I think I’d rather discuss who’s trying to hurt my son,” Rebecca Banner said slowly. “And what any of you have to do with it.” 

Coulson nodded. “Understandable. I know this might seem a little crazy to you, but—”

He was cut off as the sound of a phone ringing echoed from another part of the house.  _ Ah, the time when phones were actually attached to places.  _

Rebecca Banner looked from the hallway where it was coming from to her son to Daisy and Coulson and the rest of the team. “The phone’s in the kitchen, I… this might be important.”

“Go ahead.”

With a last cautious look, Rebecca Banner turned and hurried into the hallway. A few moments later, the ringing stopped, to be replaced with the muffled sound of talking. The four agents were left in the living room with four-year-old Bruce Banner.

At almost the same time, Daisy and Coulson walked around the couch so that they could see him. 

Little Bruce was still hard at work coloring—there was a chance he might not even have noticed the agents now in his living room. His mother had just said he was four, but he was so small that Daisy would have easily mistaken him to be the same age as some of the toddlers in the orphanage she’d grown up in. He had to push himself up to be able to reach the top of the coffee table, and his fingers looked absolutely tiny as he picked up the crayons. As they watched, his tongue stuck out of the edge of his mouth a little in concentration.

In short, he was completely adorable.

“Tony would get such a kick out of this,” Coulson muttered, a smile breaking out across his face. 

“Would be nice to tell him. If that wouldn’t mess up your whole died-eight-years-ago cover.”

“If only.”

The sound of their voices finally alerted Bruce to their presence and he looked up, immediately going still at the sight of all the strangers around him. 

Daisy lowered herself down to her knees on the carpet so she could be at his level. It didn’t seem to help; the small child still looked terrified. “Hey there, little guy.” She stopped, trying to remember what dealing with younger kids had been like at the orphanage, even though if she was being honest, she was usually the one having to be dealt with. And once she got old enough not to, she would be holed up messing around with electronics. She’d really had the ideal upbringing for becoming part of a secret agency, hadn’t she? “Um, your mommy’s gonna be back in a second, she’s just answering the phone. We’re gonna keep you company until then, okay?” She glanced at Coulson like  _ how was that?,  _ earning a shrug. 

Bruce still didn’t say anything, and when Deke approached from around the other side of the couch, he scooted backwards entirely, abandoning his coloring.

“Aw, look at him, he’s so small,” Deke grinned. “We always kept the little kids in the thirtieth levels ‘cause they were too small for Metrics. That’s in the future,” he added to Sousa.

Sousa stared at him for a moment as though trying to gauge whether or not he was kidding. “Doesn’t sound like any future I’d want to live in.”

“I mean, not the  _ future  _ future, that was more like an alternate future which hopefully won’t ever happen now, but—” Deke cut himself off once he realized both Daisy and Coulson shaking their heads at him, and Bruce’s huge eyes from where he huddled on the carpet. “Right. That was… a joke.”

“Isn’t he a little young to understand anyway?” Sousa asked, coming around himself and standing behind Coulson, who waved his hand around like “ _ ehhhh _ .”

“A couple decades from now, he’ll be one of the smartest people in the world—at least most of the time, anyway. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of that genius started when he was a kid.”

At that, Bruce gave a little squeak and scooted even further back so that his head brushed against the couch cushions. 

“Well, don’t scare him!” Daisy cried, but nobody else in the room seemed to know what to do instead. Coulson was naturally talented at getting people to let him in suspicious places to take a look around, and Sousa’s entire career was based on gathering information, and Deke was a  _ moderately  _ successful businessman, but all of those skills were almost always aimed toward adults, not small children. In fact, she was getting suspicious herself as to whether Deke had ever spoken to a human under the age of eight in his entire life, and if Coulson and Sousa’s lifestyles were anything  _ but  _ suited for children…

_ Guess this falls to me now. Why couldn’t Mack be here? Or Jemma, she’s not a parent  _ yet _ , but given Deke’s existence she’s gotta have the instincts buried somewhere in that brilliant mind... _

“Hey, Bruce,” she tried. A head peeked out from behind crossed arms. “Yeah, hi. I’m sorry if we scared you, it was an accident…”

“Do-do you work with Daddy?” A small voice, hardly audible to begin with, and made even less so when it was muffled against the fabric of his sleeves. 

Daisy frowned and looked at Coulson, who shrugged. “No. Why?”

“You said the thing he says.” Bruce dared a glance out of the hidey-hole of his clothing and immediately wrapped back around himself. Daisy looked behind her only to see Coulson’s jacket and Sousa’s suit. 

“What did we say?” she asked, spinning her mind back to try and remember. “That you’re smart?”

Bruce nodded, an… wow, an almost fearful look in his eyes. Daisy might not have had much experience in this particular area, but she’d have assumed that whenever a parent calls their child smart, it’s usually a compliment, a prelude to having their hair ruffled or taken out for ice cream or something. Whatever parents did (and apparently, her mind thought parents acted like they did in bad movies and sitcoms). But looking at the tiny Bruce Banner, she wondered exactly what being called smart in his case might have been a prelude to.

Since nobody else on the team seemed to be planning to be of any help whatsoever, she continued. “Well, we didn’t mean it that way, so… um…” Desperately, she looked at the others for help, but Sousa was staring intently at his cane and Coulson was frowning as though trying to reconcile this scared child with the Avenger he knew.

If Rebecca Banner came back into the living room now, she was never going to trust them at all, certainly not enough to go into hiding based on a ridiculous-sounding claim with no proof.

But then Deke finally dropped into a cross-legged position on the carpet and began studying the sheet of construction paper Bruce had been coloring on. “This is pretty cool, right? This thing here, it’s got lots of… squiggly lines. Love those. And a circle over here, that’s neat… it kind of looks like a planet, don’t you think?” Deke looked at Daisy suddenly. “Do they know about planets in 1973?” At her frantic nod, he continued. “A planet, like from space?”

Slowly, slowly, Bruce started to uncurl from his tight little ball, peering at Deke curiously.

“I’m from space too, you know,” Deke added, sliding the paper back onto the coffee table.

Bruce let out a startled giggle. “No you’re not!”

Daisy, and everyone else, breathed a sigh of relief. A grin spread across Deke’s face. 

“You bet I am. And you know what else, I also started a company that makes video games… okay, you don’t care about that.” Deke watched Bruce for a moment, and the little boy watched him just as intently. “Why don’t you finish your drawing so I can see what it’s really supposed to be?”

“‘Kay.” Hesitantly, Bruce reached out and picked up a blue crayon that had been colored nearly all the way to its end. He added another scribbled circle around the first one, which had been red, and Daisy started to have a sneaking suspicion as to what he was trying to draw.

“That wouldn’t happen to be a certain superhero by any chance, would it?” she asked, smiling. “One that’s, ah, red, white, and blue?”

She’d been worried about what Bruce’s reaction might be, since her earlier attempts at talking to him hadn’t gone so well, but with a quick glance up at Deke, he nodded, moving to color over a wiggly blob that might be the head. Apparently his fine motor skills hadn’t quite caught up with his brain yet. “Like my toy of him,” he said, relaxing the slightest bit more as he continued coloring. “Before it got broke.”

“You’re a Captain America fan, huh, kid?” Sousa asked. Bruce didn’t grasp the rhetoricality of the question and nodded again. “Figures.” That last part was said under his breath. 

Daisy grinned. “I was always more of an Iron Man girl, myself.”

“A what now?”

Daisy was debating whether it was worth it to explain when Bruce uncurled almost all the way, leaning over his coloring. However, his T-shirt was a little too big for him, so as he leaned, it slipped—revealing the bruised red imprints of four adult fingers and a thumb starkly visible against his tiny shoulder. 

Daisy felt more than saw everyone in the room go still. She heard Deke make a sound that was like “ _ ohh _ ” but all breath, like it had slipped out by mistake and gotten stuck.

This was not what she’d expected, even though she’d seen it—and worse—growing up. She didn’t even know why it caught her so off guard, except… well, he was an  _ Avenger _ . And yeah, she knew the whole tragic-backstory shticks most of them had, all the losing loved ones and facing off against torture and kidnapping and all that… but she’d always pictured them as adults when they struggled. As people who were strong enough to fight back. Not  _ this _ . 

They’d all been so focused on protecting Bruce Banner from Hydra…

Before Daisy’s train of thought could get any more depressing, Rebecca Banner appeared back in the doorway.

“I’m sorry, I really had to take that—oh.” She stopped when she saw the four strangers she had just invited into her home crouching around her four-year-old’s crayon drawings on the floor, but she recovered quickly enough, bending down to give Bruce a hug and hovering there protectively for a moment longer.

“Hi, Mama,” Bruce said, completely unaware of what was going on in the minds of every adult in the room. “Coloring?” 

_ Oh my god he can’t even say R’s yet.  _ Forget stopping the Chronicoms, maybe Daisy would just stay in 1973 Ohio forever. Actually, that sounded like a really depressing aspiration, never mind. 

“Maybe later, sweetie.” Rebecca Banner’s gaze swept the room, from Daisy and Deke who were cross-legged on her carpet, to Coulson who was crouching awkwardly, to Sousa who was leaning against the armchair, cane in hand. “So. Where were we? Robots taking over the planet?”

“Technically they’re a mixture of synthetic materials and—wait, you believe us?” Deke’s eyes were wide. 

Rebecca Banner slid onto the floor with the rest of them and clasped her hands atop the coffee table. “I don’t know what I believe, if I’m being honest. I don’t know who any of you are, really, or what S.H.I.E.L.D. is, or how you knew where I lived or…” She reached over to fix Bruce’s sleeve. “But I do know that if my son is in danger, and you’re telling me how I can protect him from that, then I’m willing to listen to you for as long as it takes.”

Daisy watched Coulson, whose eyes had turned heavy as though he’d remembered something from the adult Bruce Banner’s file. “Thank you, Mrs Banner. I promise, all we are trying to do is stop anything from happening to Bruce.”

“That’s more of a nickname… well, it’s his middle name, but it’s just something I call him.” Rebecca Banner kept her hand touched lightly to her son’s shoulder as he became lost in concentration again, now shading in the white star—or the wavy lines that were probably supposed to be a star—on Captain America’s shield. “But since you know everything else about us already, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“Not being surprised will definitely make telling you this a lot easier,” Sousa remarked. 

“And what, exactly, are you going to tell me?”

Daisy locked eyes with Coulson, who gave the barest nod. She faced Rebecca Banner again, sliding into her role as an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. On a mission to complete, with a goal to achieve, with enemies—too many of them—to stop, and now, with a future-scientist-and-Avenger-sized stake in the outcome.

“Where would you like us to start? 1931? 1955?”

She paused. “Or how about 2012?”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!


End file.
